Re: readdir loses renamed files

[Hans Reiser]

Andreas Dilger wrote:

> On Oct 28, 2004  11:34 +0200, Matthias Andree wrote:
>  
>
> > On Mon, 25 Oct 2004, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> >    
> >
> > > And that's because there's no good way to do this without trashing the
> > > performance of the system, especially when most applications don't
> > > care.  (Do you really want your entire system running significantly
> > > slower, penalizing all other applications on your system, just because
> > > of one stupid/badly-written application?)
> > >      
> > Please - is it really necessary that application writers are offended in
> > this way? Timo is investing enormous time and effort in writing a *good*
> > application, and he's effectively seeking a way to *robustly* deal with
> > Maildir format mail storage. Please leave it at "readdir/getdents don't
> > work the way you expect and cannot for this and that reason."
> >
> > Timo tries to implement a *robust* Maildir reader and has just bumped
> > into the flaws of DJB's "no-locking" store.
> >
> > Yes, it's a mail server again that poses file system questions on this
> > list; only it's IMAP this time rather than SMTP and directory
> > synchronous I/O...
> >    
Matthias is right.  readdir is badly architected, and no one has fixed 
it for ~30 years.

It should be possible to perform an atomic readdir if that is what you 
want to do and if you have space in your process to stuff the result.

Hans
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